You sufer from a lack of imagination my friend. With a 6x6+1 on-screen keypad it would be fairly trivial to see a code Advertisers would love to see exactly where people are placing their mouse as then they can stick ads right under your nose. And those are just the two examples in the article the more imaginative will probably have even better ideas.

Besides all that if there is a security hole of any shape it should be patched soon after its discovered, it might be a "useless" thing to day but who knows how it will morph. Fit the lock before the horse even realises there is a door.

I'd take it with a pinch of salt as this is not an official Microsoft statement. When they come out and state "they aren't doing anything about it" maybe then believe it but at the moment it's one companies word or a small company trying to gain some exposure?

I use IE and have recently experienced a temporarily unresponsive mouse on more than one occasion, usually lasts between 3 to 5 seconds. Considering that the mouse is wireless, I first thought it was a battery issue, but after replacing the battery the problem has happened again. If I recall correctly, most of the incidents happened on a very popular news site, formerly known as MSNBC. The plethora of ads on the site and pop-ups that get blocked sometimes crashes the browser and requires IE to try to automatically recover as well.

'From what we know now, the underlying issue has more to do with competition between analytics companies than consumer safety or privacy. The only reported active use of this behavior involves competitors to Spider.io providing analytics.'

Originally Posted by ShinyAli View Post
Before I and probably some others go off on an anti IE rant has anyone tested other browsers for this exploit

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gareth Halfacree

Yes, and they're not affected: it's specific to IE, as the article explains.

Maybe not,

UPDATE 2012-12-14
Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president in charge of Internet Explorer, has issued a statement on the matter. 'We are actively working to adjust this behavior in IE. There are similar capabilities available in other browsers. Analytics firms can expect to do viewpoint detection in IE similarly to how they do this in other browsers,' Hachamovitch claimed.